How subscribers work

We sometimes hear questions from the YouTube community about how subscribers work. We've addressed the most common ones we're hearing in this FAQ, but always want to keep the conversation going. If you don't find what you need, let us know in the YouTube Forum.

No. However, we’ve seen some conversations about users being “automatically unsubscribed” from channels, and when we get this type of feedback, we take it seriously. The Subscriptions team launches full investigations into the data submitted to see what's going on.

In every case we’ve looked at, we have been able to verify that there is no glitch or bug causing users to be automatically unsubscribed by YouTube. Here is what we've seen:

Most of the time, we find that the viewer is actually still subscribed to the channel.

Some users were unsubscribing from channels by accident, so we added a confirmation pop-up when users unsubscribe (this feature isn't currently available on iOS devices).

Many people thought they were unsubscribed from a channel because videos were not appearing in their Home tab. When we looked into these cases, we found they were still subscribed to the channel and had never been unsubscribed. The Home tab is designed to show you videos that we think you’ll be most interested in watching. You’re not guaranteed to see all videos from your subscriptions there, but you can find a complete list of all videos from your subscriptions in the Subscriptions feed.

Some creators assumed that specific viewers had been unsubscribed because the subscriber didn't show up in their channel's Subscribers List. This list only shows subscribers who have chosen to make their subscriptions public (and they're set to private by default).

Every video that you publish as a creator is shown in your subscribers' Subscriptions feeds by default. However, there’s an advanced setting you can use when publishing a video to stop it showing in any Subscriptions feeds. Some creators who publish daily videos use this setting to strategically show only certain videos in the Subscriptions feed.

When you upload a video, we publish it to the Subscriptions feed as quickly as we can. Usually, it should take only a few minutes or less. Making this work as fast as possible is a huge priority for the Subscriptions team. In the last six months, we’ve cut down publishing time by two-thirds.

Unless you change your distribution options, we publish every video to the Subscriptions feed. When we hear complaints from viewers that they aren’t seeing videos there, it's usually for one of two reasons:

If you're subscribed to a lot of channels, it’s easy to miss something. A lot of people have dozens — even hundreds! — of subscriptions. Sometimes, the video you’re looking for may be hard to find among lots of other subscription videos. If channels you're subscribed to post very frequently, it's possible that older videos will not show in the Subscriptions feed.

It's important to note that although all videos show in the Subscriptions feed, they don't all show in the Home tab. The Home tab shows videos that we think you as a viewer are most interested in watching right now. It isn’t guaranteed that videos from your subscriptions will show up there.

If it seems like something else is happening, you can send us feedback and we'll look into it.

We regularly verify the legitimacy of the accounts that are subscribed to your YouTube channel. This is part of a process to ensure that our site metrics are free of spam and abuse and to keep YouTube a fair playing field for everyone. Learn about subscriber counts.

When we determine that an account is spammy, it doesn't count toward your total number of subscribers. These accounts, however, are not unsubscribed from your channel. To that account, it still appears that they're subscribed and they continue to receive your videos in their Subscriptions feed.

To be totally clear, we don’t unsubscribe spam users from channels. Learn more about subscriber counts.